On a side note.... don't install this on a military computer just to check your yahoo mail.... it will get the computer taken and sent to Quantico, VA after it makes a connection in Brazil.....opps........and they will then discover that you managed to reset the xadministrator password (stupid NMCI)

Actually you sparked an idea, well sort of an observation and sort of speculation.You don't *have* to use your ISP's nameservers. Try 4.2.2.2 or other public ones relatively easy to find on the internet. You could also just toss the domain -> ip of activity you'd rather not have logged in/etc/hosts.

If you are still that paranoid why not just spend the 50 - 60 bucks it costs to bring up a co-located Celeron , toss VNC on it and surf from there if you have any concerns. A quick search on google for "dedic

Tor is not a HTTP proxy, it's a Socks proxy. You can tunnel pretty much anything through Tor, although it may not be suitable for all purposes (VoIP, for example, would probably not be very useful due to the lag etc. Tor unfortunately introduces).

I think the only thing Tor specifically disallows is to use it to connect to SMTP servers, but that's only to make sure it won't be abused as an anonymous untraceable spam relay.

IMHO, it doesn't really matter who is the first one to get such laws passed.All that matters is it gets passed.

Once that happens, the laws will spread through Europe & eventually overseas... all in the name of "harmonization"

It's a kind of backdoor way to get laws passed in your country that would otherwise be unacceptable to the populace. The Bush Administration (maybe Clinton did it to, I dunno) is the most recent example I can think of.

It's a kind of backdoor way to get laws passed in your country that would otherwise be unacceptable to the populace. The Bush Administration (maybe Clinton did it to, I dunno) is the most recent example I can think of.
They encouraged restrictive European laws that would never have flown in the U.S. of A. and once they were passed in Europe, U.S. law had to be "harmonized".

I think you are forgetting your patriot act, which got passed in the U.S. Those laws are pretty restrictive in every sense and restr

One of the outcomes of this is that we can now be contacted by your RIAA or MPAA over downloads, where previously they were unable to take action and my ISP had no obligation to cooperate.

The RIAA/MPAA arn't governmental organisations, they're trade organisations representing companies within the US. If they wanted to take action in Australia or any other country, they could have done, they just have to go through that countries legal system. If they got a court order from an Australian court (provided th

Yes, the same minister also pushing for aggressive surveillance of crime suspects -- of course to stop terrorism. Because Sweden is such a horribly obvious target for terrorists, you know. He's got a "no" from the Swedish Council of Legislation already due to the privacy issues involved, but think it will still get through soon enough and will continue to push for this, using his best G W Bush impression.

Yup. But something I read lately might give you some hope. The summation is roughly: it ain't fascism until you can't say it's fascism. We're not quite there yet, barring cops herding people into clusters at protests and smacking them down for being anti-war (yep, Chicago 2003, I think. I didn't make it to the roundup and false arrest party, but still, I remember how amazed the newscasters were at all those people who didn't listen to the President like they did, and how vicious some pro-Bush cops were, and

"At the end of the day ISPs are not law enforcement agencies so they should not have to pay for it all," [a spokesman for the Internet Service Providers' Association ] said.

And, of course, they won't need to as they'll merely pass the savings (sic) to their customers. While politicians might be willing to merely call this the 'cost of doing business in the age of terrorism' I call it yet another stab into the heart of freedom and liberty.

If all the companies are required to maintain this extra information, that would force the hard drive companies to produce higher capacity hard drives while driving down the unit cost. Who wouldn't mind paying $50 USD per terabyte?

It would appear that if you want to get legislation past PM Blair - just add a terorist threat - or say your name is Bush (guess who with have the extradition agreement with with).I'm not even starting to list domestic issues (well I guess id card is domestic) and will completely skip Iraq itself.

To be fair, isn't this an EU policy that just happened to go through when Blair was in charge of the EU? That doesn't really mean much in a system that takes months for stuff to process and go through. Why blame the UK for an EU policy? That's like blaming a State for US-wide laws.

I've been following consumer and privacy rights issues for quite some time now. The issue that ISP's are REQUIRED to log personal information is an interesting one.

First and foremost, I consider the Internet to be a type of "public" space. I am reasonably certain that anything I do on the Internet can and probably will end up in someones log file. Whether or not such information can be used against me is what really concerns me.

Second. It is reasonable to expect that ISPs do in fact keep logs of i

It is reasonable to expect that ISPs do in fact keep logs of information. What they log and how they do it is generally up to them.

They only really *need* to keep enough logs to be able to bill customers correctly and deal with disputes that might arise. Presumably, "keep records of the time/date & recipient of every communication made by their subscribers" means tracking email, IM (of all kinds), ftp, telnet, ssh, http, https, &c. I mean, it would be trivial for a terrorist cell to use anony

I see what you are saying but there is a bigger picture than privacy. The laws are obstensibly about how to deal with those who incite violence, that problem is as old as the human race itself. History has shown time and again that the answer is not to silence them but to educate ourselves to recognise those who manipulate our fears into vengence.

Here's one that was spotted in Sydney the week before the Alan [abc.net.au] Jones [abc.net.au] riots that caught the attention of international media late last year. The fact that our to

Luckily for us, it turns out all you have to do is just go up to a queue of people, put on a stern face, say "Terrorist", and they'll all happily give away all the rights that people died to gain in just a quick nip of time.

Now, on behalf of us and our ally Oceania, I'd like to thank you all, and ask you please show your papers and salute with stiff arms as we play our national anthem, "Brittania, Brittania, Uber Alles!"

Anyone else find it incredibly ironic that many conservatives in the US enthusiastically support him? I'm constantly amazed, as a libertarian, by the number of conservatives who cannot separate his support of the invasion of Iraq from his general policies. Blair and his labor party should serve as a reminder that socialism is not all about fluffy welfare states. Rather, the socialist state can also be very intrusive, and rather often is in fact rather intrusive on the basic rights of the public.

Blair and his labor party should serve as a reminder that socialism is not all about fluffy welfare states.

Blair and his Labour party are nothing to do with socialism. The abolition of Clause 4 [cool-stuff.co.uk] and granting tax breaks to businessmen [bbc.co.uk] (even though it was later revoked - at least our judges have balls) don't sound very socialist to me.

What we essentially have in today's Labour is the old conservative party only slightly less rabid.

That is an incredibly ignorant comment. Blair's government is by no means socialist! It is now significantly more right wing economically than the Conservative government that it deposed (if not yet as corrupt). In terms of authoritarianism it is probably about equal: though it has eroded many civil liberties, it has brought in new ones (such as gay rights).In any case, the government's social policies can be independent of its economic policies. See The Political Compass [politicalcompass.org] for an alternative (compared to lef

Anyone else find it incredibly ironic that many conservatives in the US enthusiastically support him?

What a lot of dreck - you US so-called "libertarians" make me want to vomit. You are so so dumb - as a libertarian socialist and a former member of the British Labour Party before Tony Bliar converted it to "New Labour", I can assure you Bliar's government has nothing to do with socialism.

The only difference between them and the Bush administration is that Bliar's government is more economically fiscally

China seeks not allow its citizens even to know what privacy means, and puts journalists in jail for using the web to speak out.

Something over 90% of the email I get is falsely titled advertising from people I've never met and will never meet trying to sell me products I don't want. And so:

The communications companies want to double-bill for bandwidth.

There is an active market for system exploits, bot armies, and malware-driven popup ads.

The U.S. wants to keep DNS root server rights to itself. This is not such a big deal to me, but other people got worked up over it.

With all of that, the EU wanting to make sure data is kept, not forever, but just long enough for most normal criminal investigations to take place doesn't bother me much. If they did other stuff with it, that would be a problem, but just making sure it's there seems prudent.

You have cameras installed in every orfice, officious busybodies poking noses into your every affair.

Your medical system is refusing treatment to patients who are over weight (gasp) or smoke (the horror) in order to save money. An un-assimilated population of immigrants is holding up signs saying "wait for the real holocaust"

What will it take to push you over the edge, the banning of cricket?

Wake up, it is already too late, and you better get cracking on fixing things.

You just lost the interest of 99.9% of the British population. You should be aware that outside the US, and perhaps Switzerland and one or two other countries, the notion that people have some kind of natural right to own guns is taken about as seriously as the assertion that people have a natural right to own nuclear weapons.

Being a UK citizen - and once being happy we got rid of the Conservative goverment with a Labour victory, I've become very annoyed and angry at the situation. I've written numerous letters to my MP, who has made plenty of promises and shown to be good at writting replies to me - perhaps nothing more. It does require a huge amount of effort from an individual to change things, and this combined effort can make a difference.

I was reminded of it tonight watching a satirical comedy current affairs show, when the last demonstration/protests which actually influenced the Goverment into changing a decision - was for lowering the homosexual age of content. [The gag of the story was that it wasn't 16 year olds males demonstrating, rather it was millions of 40+ single men with leather trousers and pierced ears]. Millions of people marched, the goverment listened - and the law was changed. Democracy worked?

The lastest demonstrations were at the G8 summit, whereby the day after the London underground/bus bombings took place - whilst all of the countries security was focused in Gleneagles. Before *that*, up to a million people demonstrated in London against the invasion of Iraq. So many many people were on the streets, a huge turn out which took an enormous amount of effort for people to make - people traveled several hundred miles to be there, which is a mean feat in itself in the UK anyway).

If the goverment won't listen to a few hundred thousand people (minimum, 1 million max) who peacefully demonstrate, execute their primary right to disagree with the goverment decision as strongly as possible - what can be done? How many people does it take to reverse a decision, or to even get a referendum on it?

The control and balance does need to be taken back, but people have too much to lose these days. They aren't directly interested in anything which isn't going to effect their bank balance or routine. Back in the day perhaps, the average family might have a lot less, be more hardup and actually demonstrating and protesting publicaly and peacefuly wouldn't be much more effort than their general hardships. Now-a-days (pipe in mouth, slippers on and reminiscing about the war..) we have it too easy that we order pizza thats cooked less than a mile away, delivered by scooter, and posted through our letterboxes. We are lazy, and we do not care/

What chances do we have while we have it so easy, such an appeased population.:(

I disagree with the examples in your post, but you are actually pointing in the right direction I think. As long as you make a noise, even if it isn't for the right reasons - just at the moment.

What has happened is that you're not allowed to shoot people in the back, as they run away from you - no matter how must they have pissed you off.

That's why the USA is so good. It's legal in Texas to shoot someone in the back for, say, letting the air out of your tires (excuse me, tyres) provided that it is at night. Also, if they have robbed you, are running away, and are off your property, it is perfectly legal to shoot them in the back. I could list all the ways in which the law states you may shoot

"'First they took your guns'
Most of us didn't have/didn't need them."

Your argument for why it doesn't matter that your Government took your guns is that you didn't need them at the time and most people didn't have them? Do you think they're just going to give them back to you when you DO need them? Even the tired old "they're too dangerous for the common man to use" argument makes more sense than that.

And why does how many people have or don't have something matter when the Government is trying to ban it? Most people 15-20 years ago didn't have cell phones; does that mean it shouldn't have mattered if the Government had banned them from private use? Plenty of people fifteen years ago would have liked to regulate the purchase of computers and bandwidth, you know (some still would).

I think you might want to check on the homocide rate per capita in both England, and the US.

Also, no one keeps track of the lives fire arms have saved.Some jack hole shoots someone at random, it is in the national news, some 70 year old lady manages to stop a mugging with a gun, it is in the local paper.

last time i checked you were twenty seven times more likely to be killed by a firearm in the USA than the UK. As i recall that was from nationmaster.com, although columbia was slightly more dangerous, so theres that to be proud of.

Your england link isn't complete, but here [statistics.gov.uk] are some stats (only up to '98) from the same site. You will notice that the murder rate is per million people. That is, the murder rate in 1998 was 1.2 per 100,000 compared to the USA's 6.3 (in 1998, 5.5 in 2004) per 100,000.

Please, it's simple minded to yell causation for a population's gun possession rates and its homicide rate. Why ignore all of the social, economic, historical and geographic issues?

For example, Canada in 2003 (the latest year I have numbers for) the homicide rate continued its steady decline to 2 per 100K. Our level of gun ownership is probably comparable to that of the US -- especially in the rural areas.

"I think you should check it out. It's much much higher in the US than in the UK (per capita). And I think you should also read up on the difference between England and the UK."yes I know, my bad.However, the homocide rate per capita in the UK is 13 people out of 100,000. In the US it is 6 people per 100,000.

"If an OAP managed to fight off a mugger it certainly would make the national news -- human interest story. I have visited the US and the biggest fans of guns were not little old ladies."

And the great point about all of this is that pro-gun people in the states think that they're going to be able to use their guns to protect their freedom. RIIIIGHT. Maybe if we had stormed D.C. in the 1920's with the revolution armed with Thompson sub-machine guns, and various automatic (i.e. semi-auto) rifles vs. the national guard and U.S. military armed with very little more than that. Not today. Forget about it. The U.S. is already a fascist dictatorship. They control the media, so they don't ha

Well there has to be some criteria, money is limited, the other answer is to tax more to create more money.

We don't have socialized medicine in the USA. We also don't have doctors refusing to treat patients because they're overweight or because they smoke. We also don't have three to four month waiting lists for bypass surgery, or a large number of other proceedures. Maybe the answer isn't more taxes, it's going back to the old system of private practice because it works better. Yes, that would mean y

I don't know if there are still free clinics, supported by charities, but I'd be surprised if there weren't. I never said the US system is perfect, just that it doesn't have many of the flaws of the British system.

Just to be clear, I'm going to respond to your post and another respondent's post at the same time.

I don't know if there are still free clinics, supported by charities, but I'd be surprised if there weren't. I never said the US system is perfect, just that it doesn't have many of the flaws of the British system.

Have you ever seen a free medical clinic? They're usually understaffed, inundated with patients, and unable to provide anything but the most basic brand of care. If you're one of those people wh

Thank you for your information. I never thought Free Clinics gave more than the minimum care, but it's good to have my impressions confirmed. I mentioned them only to show that the indigent aren't completely cut off from medical care, not to claim that they had all they needed.

Hospitals are forbidden to refuse emergency service to anybody, even if they can't pay. Alas, this has lead to more and more hospitals closing their Emergency Rooms or Urgent Care facilities because it's gotten too expensive for them. I don't say our system is perfect, but we don't have overweight people or smokers refused service simply because the are overweight or because they smoke. We also don't have wating lists for operations other than transplants because we don't have government bureaucrats deci

What you missed is the fact that I earned those benefits by putting my life on the line for my country. I was off-shore in '72 when the NVA came across the border with more armor and machinery than the Germans took to the Kursk Salient, and I helped send them running home on foot because we'd smashed all their transport, at a cost of less than 500 American casualties. During that time, I watched 6" shells land within 30 yards of my ship. Part of the contract I signed was that I'd receive these benefit

Since when? Not having guns is not the same as no right to self-defence. See above. What has happened is that you're not allowed to shoot people in the back, as they run away from you - no matter how must they have pissed you off.

What you don't seem to understand is that its all driven by a fear of not being 'in control'. How can you be 'in control' if you can't access what people are saying, what they are doing? How can you understand them if you don't know their innermost thoughts?

UK government is scared by that they don't understand, Islam, Internet, anything that has passed their arts education by. They don't understand and therefore they need 'more information' to feel that they have 'kept on top' of the problems that confront them.

You know that feeling when you are swimming, but its not working out and you are getting lower and lower in the water, swallowing more and more water? That's the UK, and when they realise it, the US governments.

So what? They have to keep logs they were probably already keeping anyways. The big deal is going to be what they are required to do with them BEYOND just keeping them around. If the powers that be can demand access to all of them, or only demand logs involved in whatever they are investigating, etc. Given the ammount of real problems on the net, I'm not entirely convinced that making it easier to track people down for doing these things is all that bad. I certainly would like to see a reduction in th

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure banks are legally required to keep a transaction history (beyond just not wanting to upset their customers). The lawmakers would be the ones to tell them they have to keep it. That doesn't mean the lawmakers can just come in and grab everyones transaction history just because they want to. They have to go through a process to gain access to the specific transaction histories they want for their investigation, and have to show why they need them.

Well, kinda the nature of the beast with the web. Really, you ARE logged every time you walk down the street, its just in an entirely different way. People are logging you. For example, looking at porn on the net for example, isn't terribly different from looking at porn in a public park. There is just an illusion of privacy because you are at home doing it. In the park, people will see you doing it, and may or may not remember specific details about who you are and what you were doing. The difference

The Patriot Act, I think, is a patently bad idea. (Which incidentally I plan on patenting the use of bad ideas in government and business, and then sueing pretty much everyone) However, the reality of it is, while there are many groups that abuse the hell out of those laws, I would hardly say that the majority of criminal cases or investigations make any use of them.

Those of you hot under the collar [and impatient] POP QUIZ: What does you ISP log now, and how long does s/he retain it? Have you asked?

I read TFA & elsewhere the word "retention". No-where does it mandate that information not being captured will suddenly have to be.

I do not expect ISPs will have to log all TCP/IP traffic (ala tcpdump). They'd need massive new firewall logging servers. Insteady, they will just have to keep their sendmail and login files for two years. And phone billing info likew

Do you have a reference saying ISPs will be required to capture new [metadata] that they are already not capturing? TFA said that incompleted cellphone calls might not be captured if the equipment wasn't capable.

Running a full capture (minus content) will not be possible on most current equipment. Crisco will be selling a lot of new routers. There are very few 100baseTX hubs out there (most are switches) so sniffing traffic will take new [router] hardware as well as the new beefy logging machine. And I

Clearly, this is part of a vast righ-wing conspiracy. Karl Rove is trying to divert attention from the Chimpler's Cabal of Evil (TM), and their complete disregard for even the most basic of human rights, by intimidating the ISPA into calling Britain the villain of the year, when that title should obviously be awarded to Bushitler. QED.
BTW, if you need to be reminded that this post is sarcastic --- well, you know you've spent too much time on Slashdot when...

Strange, I thought most members of the House of Commons and House of Lords weren't Muslim.

Nope, they're Brits of course, and we all know what that means:

Being British is about driving in a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, and then travelling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, to sit on Swedish furniture & watch American shows on a Japanese TV. And the most British thing of all? Suspicion of anything foreign.

I'm beginning to be convinced that there's no such thing as a Muslim extremist. I believe the US govt pulled the whole thing off clean. Like the gal in the movie Brazil said "How many terrorists have you MET?"

This is about the UK presidency of the European Union. I suspect the RIAA & MPAA don't figure quite so highly over there, even though they obviously have *some* impact - DVD region coding, for a start.